Apples

 

 

Photographer: Courtney Cushing Kiernat lives in Minneapolis, MN, where she enjoys photography as a creative outlet. Her two adult children and husband don’t appreciate being regularly photographed so her four dogs, Zelda, Ozzy, Ruby, and Frank, are her frequent subjects. Dog antics can be found on her Instagram: #Threeandaquarterdogs

Poet: Sue D. Burton's BOX, selected by Diane Seuss for the Two Sylvias Press Poetry Prize, was awarded Silver in the Foreword INDIES Poetry Book of the Year (2018) and was a finalist for the 2019 Vermont Book Award. She is also the author of Little Steel (Fomite Press) and was awarded Fourth Genre’s Steinberg Prize. See sueburton.com. “Apples” first appeared in Hunger Mountain. 

 

Garrow is coming up the hill to shoot the pig.

Later she is down at Garrow's hanging from a hook.

I scrape the hair from her hide.

It is clinical.

Garrow had warned me not to name the pig.

My husband and I had been teachers.

We'd moved to the farm from Baltimore.

We were city kids.

He's my ex-husband now.

We had a garden then and a pig and goats and geese.

We made cheese from surplus goat's milk.

The cheese squeaked like erasers

and we fed it to the pig.

We boiled down milk in iron pots to make cajeta.

We fed cajeta to the pig.

Then the pig wouldn't eat without milk.

She'd stand by her trough, looking up at me, and wouldn't eat.

She wouldn't eat unless I brought her falls

from the scrubby orchard across the road.

She'd turn her back and face the wall.

I started calling her Pig.

Sometimes I called her Pigasus.

I tried not to, but did.

We named the geese Ralph and Jennifer

after our best friends.

Then we couldn't eat the geese,

and we couldn't eat their goslings.

Garrow is coming up the hill to shoot the pig.

I'm telling her she's had a good life.

I'm reading to her from a book of Greek mythology.

I was so young.  It breaks my heart.

I’m reading about Demeter. Demeter and her sacred sows.

She hasn’t been fed for twenty-four hours.

Garrow said not to feed her for twenty-four hours.

She is pushing on the trough. She is looking up at me.

I wanted to believe.

I wanted to believe in something.

She is facing the wall, looking at me

from the corner of her eye.

It would be irresponsible to leave when Garrow comes.

She is pushing on the trough.

Once when we were in town, she got out of the shed

and walked all around the house,

then put herself back in.

We saw the marks in the snow.

She won’t look at me. She’s lunging at the trough.

Apples. Apples.